In recent years, the Internet has been transformed from a virtual unknown, used by only a select group of college professors and government researchers, to a virtual universe with over 120 million people visiting regularly from the U.S. alone. The number of users will continue to grow rapidly as home computers become more affordable and high speed Internet access becomes more available. As the number of users increase, so will the number of web sites. Jupiter Communication reported approximately 2 billion web pages at the beginning of 2000 and projects the number to exceed 16 billion within 4 years. The good news is that never before have businesses and consumers had such tremendous access to information. The bad news is that finding the right information among the billions of web sites has become much more difficult and time consuming. The plethora of information now available on the Internet can make even a simple search complicated.
Multiple search engines and portal directories such as yahoo.com, altavista.com or google.com, have come on-line in recent years to assist Internet users in finding web sites. The machine assembled search engines available today are very expansive and often retrieve a tremendous amount of information. They retrieve pages on the web by matching words in the pages from broad databases of text available on the world wide web. A “crawler” enters a web site and thoroughly indexes the page contents. The frequencies and proximity of significant words are tallied and form the basis of the order of display in search results from the engine. A simple search on one of these engines can produce over hundreds, if not, thousands of results. Often the results are irrelevant and a waste of time. Search engines generally display only about 10 items of the entire results per page. This is commonly referred to as “first page results”. Most often several sites listed among the first page results are not even relevant to the topic entered. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the same site to be listed multiple times on the same page, or for a site to contain offensive material. This can be a frustrating experience for the typical user.
What differentiates a search engine from a directory is simple human intervention. Directories, whether they are organized by subject categories or databases, are searchable, browsable and assembled by humans. Available directories have the same characteristics: a search bar to type in a desired topic and a limited number of predetermined categories, usually on the order of 10 to 15, such as “sports”, “shopping” or “entertainment” to browse within. In addition, most directories have very busy web pages. Usually surrounding the search bar and categories are flashing news headlines, stock quotes, horoscopes, weather and the ever present banner advertisements.
There are several stumbling blocks to a successful search using current directories. The obvious: how to fit the contents of the Internet into 10 to 15 categories. Browsing the categories often becomes a time consuming guessing game. Every web site on every topic contained within the directory is grouped into one of the 10 to 15 categories. The user commonly must guess which broad category applies to the topic of the search. An incorrect guess will cause the user to click on a pointing device, such as a mouse, numerous times more than necessary; or, even if the user guesses correctly, the user must click many times to further narrow the broad category. After the passage of a significant amount of time, it is not uncommon that a user may be twelve pages deep into a site and nowhere near the desired topic. Companies whose sites are listed in current directories must rely on the patience and intuition of web users if their sites are to be found.
The type and search format of existing search engines and directories are also cumbersome and do not lend easily to new wireless technology. Existing search engines and directories lack speed and it is often difficult to type in the text. Many of the existing directories are also “sticky.” Such directories keep the user within the site, opening as many pages as possible, for as long as possible. There is a need for an Internet directory which provides easier access through scrolling and clicking through an extensive list of topics such that a user leaves the directory and reaches their destination as quickly as possible. There is also a need for a directory with stream-lined text to facilitate downloading.
Still another disadvantage of current search engines/portal directories arises when a user cannot complete a successful search in one search engine/portal directory and seeks to resume the search in another search engine/portal directory. Exiting one sticky directory can be complicated enough, while accessing another directory to resume a search can be even more time consuming. There is a need for an Internet search engine directory that facilitates transition from one search engine/portal directory to another in order to complete a search.